Freedom, Ubuntu and offsetting your proprietary footprint

February 11th, 2010 § 0

I’ve been thinking about the whole FLOSS thing after my last few posts. I’d like to try and be a bit more rigorous in pinning down what is perturbing me. I think the issue stems from two sets of arguments.

Firstly:

  1. I am using Ubuntu because that is what I have used for a while and it gave me a good route in to GNU/Linux and FLOSS
  2. I want to ‘do the right thing’ and support free software.
  3. I am concerned about where Canonical is taking Ubuntu (see this article and the follow-up post and comments for a better discussion than I could hope to give here).

Conclusion: Ditch Ubuntu, install a free distro and build up from there.

Corollary: I will, realistically, have to use Windows at work if I do this.

Secondly:

  1. I’m lucky that my work allow me to use my own laptop at work, and that I can choose to use GNU/Linux on that laptop.
  2. Ubuntu does everything I need to work effectively at work, except use Outlook for email.
  3. The totally free distros that I’ve tried don’t, at least not without a fair bit of time spent configuring them (leaving aside issues of having to work with other folks proprietary formats and programs).
  4. I can’t do the configuring at home as I need to be in the work environment to be able to check that the configuration actually works.
  5. Time spent configuring is time spent not working.

Conclusion: I can’t work effectively enough with a totally free system, I should stick with Ubuntu.

Corollary: I can carry on using Linux at work if I do this.

Clearly I should keep using Ubuntu and be able to use Linux at work and home. I’m convinced this is the best conclusion, and it’s one I have come to before, but I still feel a nagging doubt that I want to go with conclusion 1. This is where the title of the post kicks in, and where my solution has made itself apparent.

I will offset my ‘proprietary footprint’ in the same way that people offset their carbon footprint. For every proprietary app I have to use, for every closed-format file I have to save, I will donate some code, write some documentation, or evangelise to one more person about FLOSS. It’s time to stop thinking of just me and my setup and to think about being part of the wider community. There are clearly lines to be drawn, and I will always choose the free solution over the proprietary one where I have a real choice. But where that choice is taken away, by IT rules, by having to collaborate where others use non-free tools and files, I will use the non-free, but try and give back to the free community as much as I take away.

This is more positive than being wholly-free myself but not giving anything back to the community, which is where I think I would have ended up if I hadn’t spent so long pondering this. Ideally I’d do both, but I don’t live in an ideal world - this idea feels like a step in the right direction.

Back on Ubuntu

February 11th, 2010 § 0

…not because I feel the obligation, but because the act of blogging about the thought made me realise that I spend far too much time installing other distros and then setting them up to work exactly like Ubuntu. I appreciate the freedom that Arch gives me, and I appreciate the flexibility that that system provides. It’s just that I don’t really need it. This came into sharp relief thanks to this sequence of events:

  • Want to boot Ubuntu to a text prompt and then start X when I need it
  • Can’t find an easy way to do it as they seem to have changed the boot process to avoid using inittab
  • Throw all my toys out of the pram at The Injustice Of It All
  • Wipe my machine and spend a whole weekend getting Arch to work, booting nicely to a text prompt
  • Blog about my new found freedom
  • Take an hour installing and setting up the software I need to get Arch to boot to a graphical log-in as I’m fed up of the text one

Granted, I know a lot more about Linux than I did before I started, but that’s another few hours lost that I could have spent improving my Python or PHP skills, or writing a chapter of my novel, or sorting out some of my photos, or any one of the other hundred things on my to-do list. And I could have done any of those on any of the distros I’ve tried in the last year.

Open source responsibility?

January 28th, 2010 § 0

This may be a bit stream-of-consciousness, apologies…

I just read a post about a proposed addition to Ubuntu 10.04 - Ubuntu’s integrated music service. This sounds pretty good to me. Additionally, I can see that it might start to make people think about, at the very least, giving Linux a try. So far so just-what-it-says-in-the-link. My thought is really about the burden on a user such as myself when things like this happen. Why? Read on.

When I was a Mac user it didn’t really matter what I said about them as Apple’s marketing machine was quite capable of swaying opinion without my help. Ditto for Microsoft (the effectiveness or otherwise of the Jerry ‘n’ Bill ads notwithstanding). With Ubuntu I feel it does make a difference what I, and all other Linux users, say and do. If someone looks over my shoulder on the train and sees me using Gnome on Ubuntu they would probably be interested to find out what this non-Windows thing I was using was. If they see me using the Awesome WM under Arch Linux they will probably shake their head and look the other way at what a luddite I am. It doesn’t matter if I know that the command line is more pwerful, or that getting rid of distractions and unnecessary processes makes I and my laptop more productive. People will want a free alternative if it looks like something they already know.

At my old job I was running openbox. All was set up nicely except that I had to drop to the command line to connect to a Windows share. Someone came over and asked to see a document, I popped up a terminal to connect to the server and retireve the document and they said (in essence), “this is so much harder than using Windows, why bother”. Forget the fact that it was actually quicker to go from start to open document, forget the fact that all the software I was using was free, this was ‘harder to do’. Had I popped up Nautilus and clicked on the shared drive and browsed down to the file like I would have on Windows, I’m sure the impression I’d given would have been that it was at least as easy as Windows. And it’s free!? Sign me up.

Because of distros like Ubuntu, Linux is making ground. I’ve had quite a few people say, ‘oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to try that out’ when I’ve mentioned I use Linux. I’m pretty sure they meant Ubuntu, and I’ve always straight away arranged to get them a CD to try it out.

My overall question is - as a proponent of Linux, and someone who will happily bang on about it to others, what pressure is there on me to use a distro like Ubuntu? Is it something in the makeup of a Linux user that makes them try and make life hard for themselves or is that just me? Ubuntu does all I need and more so why don’t I be a good global citizen and use it, help to promote it, make it visible? I think its the ‘and more’ that puts me off (see last post about Arch), but I don’t think I could really say why I feel the need to economise on RAM, processor use and disk space when I have more than enough to spare.

I’m not really sure what I’m even saying here, but I think there is a sea-change in the offing, and Canonical may well be the ones to boot Linux into contention for once. I’m just not sure what my role in it should be, but I genuinely feel I can play a role in this, something I never felt with Apple or Microsoft. What’s a boy to do?

Arch Linux

January 25th, 2010 § 0

Well, I’ve been edging around it for a while - slowly trying to get a bit more independent of Ubuntu, trying not to settle for the default install and making Linux work for me. It has been largely unsatisfying though, mainly because there are a lot of things I don’t like about Ubuntu, but all tempered with the fact that it does a lot of stuff well; and it really does ‘just work’. However, I hanker after a distribution that lets me have the same DIY experience that made me love Linux in the first place. Getting Linux up and running really was a triumph when I first started messing around with Suse, Mandrake and Red Hat back in the day. I miss the challenge, but I still need a system that has the potential to do everything I need.

Enter Arch Linux.

I had tried a VM install of this a while ago but decided to go all the way and do a clean install of it at the weekend. As I am writing this on that system, all geared up to use for work, it obviously has worked. But is it what I had hoped for? Yes it is! The install was actually relatively painless, if time consuming. Ubuntu 9.10 took about an hour from finishing my backup to having a completely clean install running, with all the packages I wanted installed and configured. Arch took more like three or four hours, but I really feel like I’ve built the system I want and, more importantly, I feel like I know how it all fits together. For my money Ubuntu is getting increasingly large-OS-like in its approach — and I’m including Windows and Mac in that — hiding a lot of detail from the user and changing some configuration to be more user-friendly ( for ‘user-friendly’ read ‘hard to understand and different to the way everyone else does it’).

Arch values simplicity in its best form — not meaning ‘dumbed-down’ or ’simplistic’ but meaning that everything works in a consistent way, and that your basic install is minimal but functional. You then add in the components you need to make the system you want to work with. It could be seen as a great distro for beginners, if that beginner is wanting to understand Linux and how to put a truly great and reliable system together, rather than beginning to use Linux because it is an OS that will let them ‘not use Windows’. No snobbery intended here — these are both equally legitimate paths into and through the Linux world. I think of it as being lord of the manor in both cases; with Arch you know where the wiring is, how the plumbing works, and more than a little about the structural stresses and strains of your manor. The Ubuntu manor is just as sturdy and impressive, its just you may need to call in an expert when you want to start making structural changes.

And with that almost supernatural straining of the art of simile, I’ll get back to my work…

Markdown support for Gedit

January 14th, 2010 § 0

Getting the code and installing

Grab the code from here and follow the instructions (they’re in French but pretty easy to follow if you’ve compiled your own software before). Out of the box it recognises .mdtxt files as Markdown files, but I like all my .txt files to be recognised as Markdown too, so I did a bit extra behind my scenes to get this to work.

Setting the association

First thing to do is add the “txt” extension to be recognised as markdown format. Open the file to edit:

gedit /home/nigel/.local/share/mime/packages/x-markdown.xml

then add in the glob pattern for txt files under the current pattern for files so that the file has two lines like this:

<glob pattern="*.mdtxt"/>
<glob pattern="*.txt"/>

Next, remove the txt extension association with plain text. Open the main mime types file (you will probably need to do this as root):

gedit /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml

and search for the line

<glob pattern="*.txt"/>

This should only appear once and will be in the section for ‘plain/text’.

Once you’ve done these steps, run the following two lines of code (the second may need you to be root):

update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime/
update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

then restart Gedit and you’ll be all set!

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